Movement Organizer Gathering in Tanzania

In partnership with ActionAid, for a week in September Beautiful Trouble gathered together in Tanzania leading movement figures from four continents, and mixed them with civil society folks from formal civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to share lessons and stories, and explore how movements and NGOs can better work together and strengthen that relationship.

NGO-ification is a big issue (read: Arundhati Roy’s piece in Beautiful Rising), and is well-recognized within NGOs. Principles of solidarity were harvested in these conversations — some of which will be filtered into our new sister project “Solidarity Not Aid” (more on this to come!).

We also discussed the practical examples of how you should always make sure you unpack your own privilege, how NGOs easily can spend money on direct activities such as food for an event, paint at the paint shop for your banner etc — in that way supporting groups that don’t have a formal structure… some of the small but good tricks that go in the toolkit!

For more information on Beautiful Trouble / Beautiful Rising workshops, please get in touch!